Oliver Burkeman QUOTES

41 " Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results. "

― Oliver Burkeman , Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

43 " Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable truth that everything is impermanent. "

― Oliver Burkeman , The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

45 " The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. "

― Oliver Burkeman , Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

47 " I asked him what he thought was the biggest barrier to happiness for most people. ‘It’s just a total absence of awareness, except for the thoughts that are continuously passing through your mind. It is the state of being so identified with the voices in your head’ – and at this point he emitted a tight Germanic chuckle – ‘that you think you are the voices in your head. "

― Oliver Burkeman , The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

49 " We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them; their flourishing depends on a certain degree of not being protected, of being open to experiences both negative and positive. "

― Oliver Burkeman , The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

51 " All these counterproductive ways of thinking about failure manifest themselves most acutely in the phenomenon of perfectionism. This is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not so secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw – yet perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live. (There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.) "

― Oliver Burkeman , The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

53 " What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things. "

― Oliver Burkeman , The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

55 " Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is. "

― Oliver Burkeman , Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

57 " One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most. "

― Oliver Burkeman , Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

59 " For the Stoics, the realisation that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can’t choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility. For the Buddhists, a willingness to observe the ‘inner weather’ of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions. Each of these is a different way of resisting the ‘irritable reaching’ after better circumstances or better thoughts and feelings. But negative capability need not involve embracing an ancient philosophical or religious tradition. It is also the skill you’re exhibiting when you move forward with a project – or with life – in the absence of sharply defined goals; when you dare to inspect your failures; when you stop trying to eliminate feelings of insecurity; or when you put aside ‘motivational’ techniques in favour of actually getting things done. "

― Oliver Burkeman , The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking